Women and paid work

This chapter focuses on women economists’ discussions of women’s access to paid work. It begins with a historical overview of women’s relation to paid and unpaid work. In subsequent subchapters, Joanna Rostek considers the writings of Priscilla Wakefield and Mary Ann Radcliffe, who censure that cultural impediments limit middle-class women’s access to remunerated work. Rostek analyses Wakefield’s pamphlet Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798) and Radcliffe’s pamphlet The Female Advocate (1799) as well as her Memoirs (1810). She reveals that both authors engage with ideas that would re-emerge in the twentieth century, such as positive discrimination, occupational segregation, the demand for equal pay, and economic causes of prostitution.